Poems begin each

Issue of JAMA, which is

An uncommon start.

Not always great but

Doesn’t mean health poems

Can’t inspire doctors.

Winners of a contest

Of online haikus are

Found by clicking here.

The Department of Health has released a guide to how medical students can help in the event of pandemic flu. It’s predominantly relevant with final year medics. There’s probably scope for expansion to other potential disasters, although this guidance applies explicitly to this particular disaster.

People throughout the ages have forged group identities by use of their own mannerisms and development of their own slang. Understand what people were saying and communicating with them was a sign of membership of a group. These terms would not find their way into dictionaries as they were not in common use, so it was not possible to look up what they meant. Now anyone can log onto sites like Urban Dictionary and look up such definitions as Selected Fatigue Syndrome.

Fatigue which is used as an excuse when one does not want to perform undesirable tasks such as work.

My co-worker claimed her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome kept her from coming to work, but she had no problems making it to the nightclubs. What she really has is Selective Fatigue Syndrome.

I remember being told by a sociologist in a lecture at some point that medicine is seen by some as a sub-culture in itself. It’s easy to become completely lost in jargon. For this reason, SlangRN.com has been set up to serve as an Urban Dictionary of medicine. Words like donorcycle are defined, but several of the terms from the House of God are thankfully absent.

Phillip von Hohenheim was born with quite a good name in 1493, but it wasn’t quite good enough. He adapted the fairly amazing name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim before the less impressive Paracelsus. This was just making the point that he was as good as, or perhaps better, than Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the Roman author of De Medicina.  Whether or not he was in fact better than Celsus is contentious, but he was quite an innovative doctor at the time. He has been called the father of toxicology for his dictum “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous”. Rarely has this been illustrated so well by this parable from The Sun:

A HORRIFIED mother condemned teachers after her 14-year-old son nearly died when he overdosed — on NICOTINE GUM.

Today Aiden’s mum Caroline, 36, called for the gum to be banned in school after her son’s hospital overdose ordeal.

Just goes to show, you can’t be too careful, and that even the safest medications have dangers.

The General Medical Council inspects each UK medical school in what is known as the QABME (Quality Assurance of Basic Medical Education) cycle. The result of this decides on whether or not a medical school is allowed to remain awarding medical degrees, so it is something they tend to take quite seriously. They are measured against the standards set in Tomorrow’s Doctors, the guide to undergraduate education produced by the GMC. This information is in the public domain and can be found here.

The visionary David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has taken some data and turned it into pictures. In this instance he has turned swine flu statistics into coloured-in maps and tables. Visualisation can often be a useful tool to help people to understand things. Certainly claims that ‘the USA have had more deaths from swine flu than any other country’ can sound worrying until you examine the ideas further. I’d really like to see more information in this format, it’s a lot easier to remember bits of red and blue on maps than tables of text. If departments of health or the World Heath Organisation made information freely available in a standardised format it would be possible to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to make maps automatically. Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org developed software to turn global health statistics into graphs, which turned out to be so good it was bought by Google. As a consequence, lectures at schools of medicine and public health all around the world became more interesting. If someone could make software to make maps using this precedent that would be much appreciated by students and policy makers everywhere.

The National Patient Safety Agency is running an essay competition for medical students. This is the first time that such an essay prize has been run in the UK. The essay title is as follows:

‘The world of patient safety through the eyes of a medical student.’
a. Three prizes will be awarded at the annual Patient Safety Congress.
b. The winner will receive £500 and the two runners-up £200 each.

The closing date for submission is 15th December 2009.

Please send all entries by email to:

Mrs Barbara Wilde,
PA to Dr. Kevin Cleary,
Medical Director, NPSA.
Telephone: 020 7927 9500
E-mail: barbara.wilde@npsa.nhs.uk

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact Dr Vivian Tang, Clinical Adviser to the Medical Director on  vivian.tang@npsa.nhs.uk

The visionary David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has taken some data and turned it into pictures. In this instance he has turned swine flu statistics into coloured-in maps and tables. Visualisation is the often the best way for people to understand things. Certainly claims that ‘the USA have had more deaths from swine flu than any other country’ can sound worrying until you think about them. I’d really like to see more information in this format, it’s a lot easier to remember bits of red and blue on maps than tables of text. If departments of health or the World Heath Organisation made information freely available in a standardised format it would be possible to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to make maps automatically. Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org developed software to turn global health statistics into graphs, which turned out to be so good it was bought by Google. As a consequence, lectures at schools of medicine and public health all around the world became more interesting. If someone could make software to make maps using this precedent that would be much appreciated by students and policy makers everywhere.

With all UK final year medical students (hopefully) having submitted their applications for foundation year jobs the process begins matching them up to jobs. UKFPO have helpfully detailed the process. Question 1 is the one about qualifications and presentations, so marking it is more a case of verification that anything else. Interesting that applicants are scored by their first choice foundation school. The reason may be that applications tend to get into their first choice schools, and foundation schools tend to use UKFPO scores in sorting applicants into their jobs, so foundation schools will be more in control of which jobs go to whom. The proportion of applicants getting into their first-choice foundation school has been high but decreasing slightly year-on-year for the first three years. Last year, it dipped below 90% for the first time. The ratios can be found here. It’s possible that competitive foundation schools such as North East Thames and Severn may score more harshly than other foundation schools, although it’s also possible that they may score less harshly.

November 2009: Application forms are scored by a panel from the applicant’s first choice foundation school with the exception of Question One which will be scored by a national panel.

9 December 2009: Application results will be available to view via applicants’ online accounts.

25 January 2010: Deadline for applicants to rank the programmes available in their allotted foundation school in order of preference.

16 February 2010: Applicants will be notified of their match to specific programmes within their allotted foundation school.

Until 26 February 2010: References will be requested from two referees.